Trinidad Creole Quotes

Yuh cyah vex when soca playin ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Pushed times make a monkey chew pepper.~ Creole proverb. (challenging times inspire unique actions) ~ Myra Jolivet

Menyara's Creole accent was as thick as his mother's jar of refrigerated roux, and Nick loved the sound of it.
He wasn't quite as pleased with his own. No matter how hard he tried to hide his accent, it always came out in certain words like "praline", "etouffee", "pecan", and any time he lost his temper. You could easily tell how mad he was by how Cajun he sounded. And if he started spewing all Cajun words, duck. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Bright coral and sand spread thirty-five feet below, crisp in the air-clear water. Blue clouds of Creole wrasse parted as Hugh dropped. White and yellow flashes of yellowtail snapper flitting past. How could he have questioned if coming back here was the right thing? Bubbles rose from five buddy teams. Swimming five different directions. Hugh kicked hard after the nearest pair. ~ Tim W. Jackson

The weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James , Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the 'Trinidad Sentinel' had no choice. It gave Mr Biswas three months' notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper. ~ V.S. Naipaul

How she wished she were back at home with her family, strumming her banjo on the porch while Grampa Cornpone played the fiddle. Oh, the steamy bayou nights of her youth! Ma would cook up a huge pan of Creole innards, whilst Pa sat in the corner smoking his pipe of tabaccy with the hound dogs snoozing at his feet. ~ Howard Mittelmark

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it. ~ Frantz Fanon

Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sautes it. There's, um, shrimp ka-bobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pan-fried, deep-fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich ... That's, that's about it. ~ Mykelti Williamson

I grew up on the island, Trinidad to be exact, and I never thought it would be possible. These sort of things happen once in a lifetime. I just know God is bigger than me and everything I do is to serve and please Him. ~ Heather Headley

I have always loved music. My mom used to sing with my sister and I when I was younger, and I was in choirs and loved to perform, but when I was in college, I went on a study abroad to Trinidad, and while I was there, I sang backup at my first concert. ~ Rachel Platten

By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world's land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia's mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential. ~ Pankaj Mishra

The Bishop observed later that Trinidad was treated very much like a poor relation or a servant. He was sent on errands, was told without ceremony to fetch the Padre's boots, to bring wood for the fire, to saddle his horse. Father Latour disliked his personality so much that he could scarcely look at him. His fat face was irritatingly stupid, and had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth
were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby's legs, and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was embedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but
ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same greedy way upon the girl who served the table - and who seemed to regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or another. ~ Willa Cather

When I was growing up, I grew up in church
my father was a pastor
so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them. ~ Heather Headley

Creole Sauce ... This sauce is fine on cooked shrimps, fish, or meat, disguises leftovers, and will even make boiled tripe taste less like bath towels. ~ Margaret Yardley Potter

Some daughter of one of the gentry planters, perhaps? Those girls had the domestic virtues. But - he was comfortable enough with his good servants at Fairfield House. His yearnings had little relation to somebody to preside over his household. Somehow, to Cornelis, these young ladies of the planter gentry were not alluring, vital. The most attractive of them, Honoria Macartney, he could hardly imagine beside him perpetually. Honoria had the dead-white skin of the Caucasian creole lady whose face has been screened from the sun since infancy.

("Sweet Grass") ~ Henry S. Whitehead

The definition of gumbo is almost as slippery as that of Creole. Just as gumbo can contain pretty much any kind of meat or seafood, Creole is a vague and inclusive term for native New Orleanians, who may be black or white, depending on whom you're asking. ~ Jay McInerney

People ask me all the time how I got hired onto the Office. Another common question is how do I manage to stay so down-to-earth in the face of such incredible success? ... A third frequently asked question is: "Girl, where you from? Trinidad? Guyana? Dominican Republic? You married? You got kids?" This is mostly asked by guys on the sidewalk selling I LOVE NEW YORK paraphernalia in New York City. ~ Mindy Kaling

No day would be complete without chocolate. My favorite: Vosges Creole bar - it's dark chocolate with cocoa nibs. Holy Toledo, that thing is good. ~ Lisa Edelstein

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.'
Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If you want to see what my Earthsea looks like, you could sail past the Scilly Isles (handy for you Brits); or you could go to a little bay called Trinidad on the far north coast of California on a foggy morning (not so handy for you Brits). But these are both places I saw long after I had mapped and travelled in the Archipelago. It was pleasant to be able to say - ah! yes! that looks just like the West Reach! ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

My family is part Creole, and we're Indian, and we're also very, very black. My father was so black, he was blue. ~ Merry Clayton

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible. ~ Honore De Balzac

far noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inna disya time yah... ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson

I played a lot of the original 'Fight Night.' I think the depiction of Trinidad in the game was awesome. ~ Diego Corrales

I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know. ~ Robert Antoni

My corps of attorneys will contact you in the morning wherever it is that you carry on your questionable activities. I shall warn them beforehand that they may expect to see and hear anything. They are all brilliant attorneys, pillars of the community, aristocratic Creole scholars whose knowledge of the more surreptitious forms of living is quite limited. They may even refuse to see you. A considerably lesser representative may be sent to call upon you, some junior partner whom they've taken in out of pity. ~ John Kennedy Toole

I grew up on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, on an expat estate, and that meant I had no idea about money until a lot later than most children. ~ Andrea McLean

One of my officers said to me that Trinidad and Tobago is seen like an ATM card ... you come in with the card and you come back out with cash. It cannot happen anymore. It just cannot happen. ~ Kamla Persad-Bissessar

I speak Italian, French, Creole and English. ~ Meta Golding

Thank you. There were three of us kids, all right together. I'm the oldest, she was the knee-baby, and my brother Henry came last. Funny, I miss her all the time, but I miss her most when I'm reading Austen. We'd been fans since we were in the seventh and eighth grade, two Creole girls gigglin' about marriage proposals gone bad. Our daddy teased us about reading each other passages during a Fourth of July crawfish boil, so he named the biggest one Mr. Darcy and threw him in the pot." She looked up, a smile fighting the tears in her eyes. "We refused to eat him. ~ Mary Jane Hathaway

I'm Creole, and I'm down to earth. ~ Boozoo Chavis

My heart was burning for home. For a moment I felt like crying out, but at the moment of greater pain my mother's voice came back to me. It was as if she was here and talking, Stay and take an education, boy. Take it in, That's the main thing. ~ Michael Anthony

Creole is New Orleans city food. Communities were created by the people who wanted to stay and not go back to Spain or France. ~ Paul Prudhomme

On sentry duty with Hazel, he would try to take his mind off it. He loved spending time with her. He asked her about growing up in New Orleans, but she got edgy at his questions, so they made small talk instead. Just for fun, they tried to speak French to each other. Hazel had some Creole blood on her mother's side. Frank had taken French in school. Neither of them was very fluent, and Louisiana French was so different from Canadian French it was almost impossible to converse. When Frank asked Hazel how her beef was feeling today, and she replied that his shoe was green, they decided to give up. Then Percy Jackson had arrived. Sure, Frank had seen kids fight monsters before. He'd fought plenty of them himself on his journey from Vancouver. But he'd never seen gorgons. He'd never seen a goddess in person. And the way Percy had controlled the Little Tiber - wow. Frank wished he had powers like that. ~ Rick Riordan

New Orleans may well have been the most liberal Deep South city in 1954 because of its large Creole population, the influence of the French, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere. ~ Constance Baker Motley

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish - magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they're supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most "advanced" economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. ~ David Graeber

You ain't old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I set myself to climb it, there was always a woman passing by to yell at me and tell me to get down. Asked me why I leaving my poor mother to do all the housework. I never got to the top. It was like God was always watching, ready to send another hag to tell me down. Then, one day, they cut down the tree. ~ Kevin Jared Hosein

You don't have to come from Trinidad to really love Harry Belafonte, you don't have to come from the West Coast to appreciate the simplicity and the beauty of the songs Kurt Cobain wrote. ~ Seth Avett

Don't give me no 'but you're beautiful on the inside' bullshit."

"No, you are beautiful on the outside," I say.

"Don't give me that bullshit either. I'm beautiful when I say I'm beautiful. Let me own that shit," she says. Her eyes have not left the computer screen this whole time, but I know she's paying attention to everything I say.

"Okay, then you are ugly."

"Thanks for being honest."

"Seriously. That's what we say in Haiti. 'Nou led, men nou la.' We are ugly, but we are here."

"We are ugly, but we are here," she says, almost whispering. "I hear that. ~ Ibi Zoboi

Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don't recognize. ~ James Lee Burke

I love Trinidad and I love living there, but it's quite harsh. ~ Peter Doig